Cooking, Home Confinement, and Storytelling: A Q&A With Elinor Lipman, Author of Ms. Demeanor, Our January Fiction Pick 

In a way, was this story of home quarantine at all inspired by the different kind of quarantine we all went through at the start of the pandemic? 

House arrest, as a plot point, popped up suddenly at the end of the first chapter, surprising me. Yikes; now what do I do?  I did borrow from real life in terms of Jane’s limitations and buying habits and boredom — everything ordered online and delivered.  She binges on British police procedurals (me, too; no research needed there). I’d originally had a few references to the Pandemic in an early draft, but my editor thought it best to keep it timeless, let the readers make their own comparisons. And having run everything by several lawyers and a judge, I used “home confinement” where I wanted to be legally correct. 

Your main character, Jane Morgan, loves to cook and discover old recipes via older cookbooks. Do you like to cook too, and if so, what’s your favorite dish to cook? 

I love to cook. I write in the morning and then by mid-afternoon I start to wonder, is it too early to start prepping dinner? I have a very appreciative Significant Other, who was my isolation-mate. I baked all our bread and even our crackers. I make fish often and have at least three can’t-miss, favorite salmon recipes. I make a lot of Indian food, too — almost every recipe from my collection of Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks.  

Jane Morgan becomes an unexpected hit on TikTok when filming some cooking videos at the insistence of her sister. Was this inspired by creators that you’ve seen from the platform? If you were on the app, what kind of videos would you make? 

I have to confess that I hadn’t spent one second on TikTok until I read the very piece in the New York Times that Jane and her sister read, “TikTok, The Fastest Way on Earth to Become a Food Star.” I ran all my TikTok references by someone who knew the ins and outs. If I were on the app, I think my videos would be like Jane’s — apologetic. stream-of-consciousness and messy.   

Your book explores themes of connection, intimacy, sisterhood, and friendship, particularly in bustling NYC and among those deemed a success in the workforce, but ironically, a lot of these themes were explored as result of the sudden loss of the bustle of the city and the loss of Jane’s job. What do you hope readers will take away from this book after they’ve finished reading? 

As I’m writing I don’t think about what I want readers to take away in terms of themes or lessons. My duty is to storytelling, to move the plot forward, to engage and entertain, to make the characters and their actions believable. I once heard the late, great author Robert Stone when asked, “What’s the purpose of a novel?” answer, “To make the reader feel less lonely.”  I loved that. I would add, “to make the reader satisfied.” I was once introduced by a librarian as “the poet laureate of second chances.” Maybe that’s my hoped-for takeaway: This could be you. 

As a bookseller, we have to ask: what books are you currently reading and recommending to people?   

Happy to! I give them all five stars:  

• Newsroom Confidential by Margaret Sullivan 
• The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff 
• The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide by Alexandra Marshall 
• The Palace Papers by Tina Brown  
• Smaht Guy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank by Eric Orner